Andrew Martin (left) with his father John. Photograph: Don McPhee for the Guardian

In his book The Pinch, MP David Willetts defines a baby boomer as someone born between 1945 and 1965. That includes me since I was born in 1962 and must plead guilty to being part of the generation that has – Willetts persuasively contends – gorged itself at the expense of its children.

But I am only just a baby boomer, and I feel like a minor accessory to a bank heist, implicated despite having failed to get a decent cut. The comfortable retirement that is supposed to be the boomer birthright seems remote in my case, and I'm starting to question my long-held belief that I am, historically speaking, luckier than my father, John Martin, who was born in 1928.

The belief kicked in when I was about 12. Before that, I had thought he was luckier than me, but this was down to his physical capabilities rather than societal advantages. Every year we had a running race on the beach at Blackpool and he would always beat me – once, gallingly, with a cigarette in his hand. Whereas I couldn't make the school football team, he had played professionally for York City, albeit only once because, as a railway clerk, he had to work Saturday afternoons.

Also, in 1939, aged 11, my father had passed "the scholarship" and so gone to Nunthorpe grammar school in York (subsequently famous as the alma mater of Vince Cable and infamous as that of Steve McClaren). In 1973, by ignominious contrast, I failed what had become known as the 11-plus, and went to a secondary modern.

But secondary moderns weren't the dumping grounds they had been 30 years before, and I prospered at mine. I formed the idea that although I had been a failure at 11, a beneficent state would rescue me, whereas my father's grammar had evidently been a rather gothic place. All the best teachers had gone off to the war, and my dad's cohort was left with the doddery or wimpish remnants. He recalls: "There were these sandbags piled up against the walls, and we'd actually hurl these at the teachers we didn't respect." As the son of a fitter at Rowntree's chocolate factory, my father was "way down the social scale", which he found demoralising. Only a fifth of pupils went on beyond 16 to take the higher school certificate, and only a very few of those – the richer ones – went on to university. "There was a lot of peer pressure and a lot of family pressure to be earning at 16," he says.

I used to think that because he left school at 16, my father was a victim of the sheer plenitude of work available after the war. "The unemployed were different in those days," he says. "They were unemployable." In York, the standard options were chocolate or the railways, and my dad chose the railways, although he toyed with the idea of being a policeman. He believed – ungainsayably, I would have thought – that he was brighter than the average copper: "So I don't think I'd have been long on the beat." He liked the idea of being a detective, but was never ambitious – "I never competed with my friends, and they never competed with me" – and even at 16, part of the appeal of joining the force was the prospect of an early and well-cushioned retirement.

By 16, I, on the other hand, was gloatingly aware that a high road to university lay open to me: 80% of my sixth form went to university and I was one of about 10 who went to Oxbridge. My father wasn't impressed. I remember meeting him at Oxford railway station on a drizzly afternoon, to be greeted by the bleak enquiry: "Where are all these dreaming spires, then?'

This was the height of my triumphalist phase – and I think I may have been wearing a bow tie as I escorted my dad towards those spires. My grandfather had been a blue-collar worker; my father was a white-collar worker, I would be ...well, anything I liked. My father and grandfather were like those parts of a rocket that fall away in order to get the lunar module (me) into space.

My father retired from the railway in the mid-80s when I left university. He had risen to a senior grade and might have gone into the top layer of management, but that would have involved moving to London which, as a widower (my mother had died in 1972) he didn't quite have the nerve to do. I qualified as a lawyer, but such was my self-confidence – largely derived from the degree to which I exceeded my father academically – that I decided to become a famous novelist.

My father had always been top of the class in English and was – and is – a great reader, with a particular liking for the works of Ernest Hemingway. But in his young day, the literary profession was monopolised by the independently wealthy.

Unfortunately, that is the state to which it is returning, but I had a good ride thanks to the print media boom of the 1990s and beyond. A telephone conversation between me and my father in, say, 2002 would have been terminated by my peremptory observation that I was "on deadline" with some article, or indeed book, needing to be handed in that very afternoon. My father never seemed to mind. He is not, as far as I can tell, neurotic, perhaps because he has always met what ought to be the defining criterion of adulthood: financial stability.

Having left the railway at 55, he came in for one of those retirement deals that now seem like the stuff of mythology. I read recently of the "gold plated" pension that civil servants taking voluntary redundancy will receive. But the smaller print revealed that these pensions were payable only in return for them giving up their entitlements to lump sums.

Yet when Margaret Thatcher was seeking voluntary redundancies among railway management in the mid-80s, my father was offered a pension that was a high percentage of his wage, and not one but two lump sums: "I couldn't afford not to take it,' he says. And so would arise his own opportunity for gloating, if he were so inclined. I have no pension. As Thatcher was paying my father off so generously, she was also liberalising the pension laws in such a way as to cut adrift anyone as financially incompetent and – all right – imprudent as me. My father and I both enjoy the baby boomer privilege of owning property, but whereas he regards his house as a place to live, I regard mine as an asset, to be burnished and, above all, fretted over. I do not indulge in the middle-class vice of talking about property prices, simply because I can't bear to contemplate the idea that the proceeds from the eventual sale of my house might not keep me in my old age.

As my own profession began to be undermined by the all-consuming recession and technological change, and as I began to curtail the phone calls with my father more to save money than to get on with an article, I couldn't help noticing that he and my stepmother were going on holiday about every other month. "We're somewhere in eastern Europe that weekend. Can we see you the following week?" They, the beneficiaries of the statism that Cameron is trying to quell, have for 20 years embodied the "big society" he is trying to promote, so many clubs and societies do they belong to.

Their children are off their hands, while my two teenage sons face an uncertain financial future (university fees and all that), and I've a horrible feeling that this will compound the uncertainty of my own financial future. They are used to apocalyptic conversations over the dinner table. The threat of a dramatic downsizing, involving a move to a farm labourer's cottage or similar, has hung over them for most of their lives, and they have so often heard me exclaim, on opening some new bill, "That's it! We're putting the bloody house on the bloody market!" that they now barely look up from their homework.

This turbulence – shared by many of my contemporaries in all professions – contrasts with the certainties of my father's life. Take the war: "There was no question but that we'd win it." Anyway, he was called up only afterwards, so his experience of the conflict was as a boy scout messenger for the York ARP wardens. This left him with the groundedness I associate with his generation, and a fund of Boy's Own stories – he once saw a house fall on and kill two firemen ("The wholefacade fell as one piece, and there were two man-shaped bulges in the bricks") – with which he can trump my own anecdotes. As for his working life, he believes the railways were better run under British Rail than by the current privatised regime.

"But it was the fact that, unless you were caught with your hands in the till, you would not be sacked. It just wasn't the culture."

The street I grew up in was populated by men who did the same job all their lives. It was like Happy Families: Mr Walker, the Printer, Mr Jones, the Train Driver ... You might say that in writing fiction I have done a job that I have, on occasion, loved, whereas my father did "work that I was perfectly happy to do". But I increasingly think of our intertwining lives as being rather like a good novel, in which the final twist becomes slowly manifest: the old man has the last laugh. "On balance," he says, "I was born at just about the right time."

Andrew Martin's novel The Somme Stations will be published by Faber in March